THE DRAMA 



THE IDEA OF TEAGEDY 1 



BY WILLIAM L. COURTNEY 



[William Leonard Courtney, Editor of the Fortnightly Review since 1894; b. 

 in India in 1850; educated University College, Oxford; LL.D. St. Andrews; 

 member editorial staff of Daily Telegraph, London; and one of the directors 

 of Chapman and Hall's Publishing House; produced his drama, Kit Marlowe, 

 in 1893; and in 1903 a dramatic version of De LaMotte Fouque's story, 

 Undine. Author of The Metaphysics of John Stuart Mill; Constructive 

 Ethics; The Development of Maeterlinck; three lectures on Tragedy; and 

 Studies at Leisure. 



THERE is a curious passage in one of Heine's prefaces in which 

 he says that while writing his poems he seemed to hear the whirring 

 of the wings of a bird above his head. He asked some of his brother 

 poets in Berlin whether they had had a similar experience, but they 

 only looked at each other with a strange expression and declared that 

 nothing of the kind had occurred to them. 2 



The wings which Heine had heard, and the young Berlin poets had 

 never heard, were the rush and whirr of new ideas. Only those who 

 are conscious of this wing-winnowing are inspired by the thoughts of 

 a newer era, and are awake when the dawn appears. To Euripides, 

 at all events, who, though to some extent contemporary with the 

 older poets, ^Eschylus and Sophocles, was a whole age after them in 

 thought, there must have come the strange sounds which Heine heard ; 

 for no one more characteristically than he became the exponent of a 

 period of revolution and change. It was a new heaven and a new 

 earth, or, at all events it was a new earth, which figured itself in his 

 imagination, an earth in which rationalizing thought, a clear logical 

 intelligence, and a determination not to accept unverified and un- 

 verifiable dogmas wrought havoc with the older scheme of things. 



There was much in the contemporary state of Athens, so different 

 from the Athens of the Persian wars, to explain and account for 

 the transformation; but the phenomenon itself which was being 

 exhibited in the Ionic capital can be sufficiently interpreted from 

 the spiritual or intellectual side alone. No one can be sure whether 

 Euripides was the friend of Anaxagoras or of Socrates; but the 

 point is of little consequence, for there was a certain kinship between 



1 This lecture was originally delivered at the Royal Institution, London, Eng- 

 land, and is presented here to supplement the lectuies originally prepared for 

 the International Congress of Arts and Science. 



2 Heine's preface to his New Poems. 



